springthistle

This plugin is useful if you are using lots of posts in a variety of ways on your website, i.e. not just on your homepage and not just separated out by categories. For example, You may have a blog with lots of information on upcoming events and lots of announcements. You have a variety of people who come to your blog looking for different information, and it’s hard for them to filter through everything. You can have a “Cats” page on which you talk about your stance on cats, and use <code>[ahs_callposts]</code> to also call in a list of posts in the “cats” category, perhaps only the most recent 10, perhaps just titles, perhaps displaying just excerpts, perhaps displaying an image for each post. Then have a separate page for the “dogs” category. Etc!
<h3>Features</h3>
<ul>
<li>Specify category</li>
<li>Specify number of posts</li>
<li>Specify content style</li>
<li>Specify random order</li>
<li>Specify multiple columns</li>
<li>Create your own template (NEW as of 2.0)</li>
<li>… and more</li>
<li>Choose global default settings that can be overridden for any individual instance of the shortcode.</li>
</ul>

April's Call Posts

Via shortcode, lets you call in a list of posts that are filtered, ordered, and displayed based on criteria you provide.

Shellbot

Posts by Category lets you display a list of posts pulled from a particular category or tag, and optionally 
group them by year, month or first letter of the post title.
Current features include:
<ul>
<li>Set a title to be displayed above list of posts</li>
<li>Shortcode allows post list to be inserted anywhere</li>
<li>Limit how many posts should be displayed</li>
<li>Group posts by year, month or first letter</li>
</ul>
Usage
To display the list of posts, add the following shortcode to your post or page.
Default settings:
<pre><code>[sb_category_posts]
</code></pre>
Custom settings:
<pre><code>[sb_category_posts show="10" cat="3" group_by="year"]
</code></pre>
For full list of parameters see <a href="http://codebyshellbot.com/wordpress-plugins/posts-by-category/" title="Posts by Category" rel="nofollow ugc">the plugin release page</a>

Posts by Category

Display a list of posts from a specific category or tag.

April's Call Posts vs Posts by Category